Texts, Tasks, and Talk. Brad Cawn
Such texts should contain ideas and language that, beyond simply being grade appropriate, both challenge the reader and contribute to his or her intellectual growth.
Good texts are rich in language, enabling students to practice with texts in the respective grade-level text-complexity band. They are also rich in ideas, enabling students to practice learning and applying the knowledge and skills of other reading standards in your framework. By design, such texts push the limits of students’ existing comprehension and fluency skills. They require meaningful instruction and learning opportunities for comprehension. They are, then, very deliberate teaching tools, not only for their content but also for the way they may support students’ abilities to understand that content.
The Complex Text in High School
What does it mean for a text to be rigorous high school reading? Lexile scores, the measure of a text’s sophistication in terms of its vocabulary and sentence structure, give us a starting point to determine rigor: students should enter high school ready to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s (1963) “I Have a Dream” speech (roughly scored at 1070L) and exit at the end of twelfth grade capable of independently reading passages of philosophy, theory, and criticism, such as that of Stephen Jay Gould (science), Jared Diamond (social sciences), and Leslie Fiedler (English), all of which typically score above 1300L. If such a progression appears daunting, consider how dangerous the status quo has been: the typical college-bound senior leaves high school having engaged entirely or predominantly in texts 150–200 Lexile points below the range of readings they are likely to experience in college coursework; that’s the equivalent of one to two years of reading exposure they have not experienced! (See the CCSS appendix A [NGA & CCSSO, n.d.a] for a description of how and why that gap came to be.) A critical aim of next-generation standards is to narrow this gap, hence the recommendations to not only increase the level of text complexity in each grade or grade band but also to establish a range so that students experience a coherent progression of complexity across grades. Figure 2.1 displays the text-complexity ranges for all grade bands both before (light gray) and after calibration (black) with the Common Core.
Source: Adapted from NGA & CCSSO, n.d.a.
Figure 2.1: Comparison of old and Common Core–aligned Lexile ranges.
To put it in the most basic terms: high school students need to increase their reading capacity by some 200 Lexile points between grades 9 and 12, and a full 130 Lexile points more than previously expected. In fact, the difference between the old and new expectations for grades 9–10 reading is almost 200 points alone–the low end of the old range is now the high end of fifth grade (Williamson et al., 2014).
Of course, numbers alone only provide a target or a range; they are not sufficient for determining what should be taught. Considered solely for quantitative text complexity, Ralph Ellison’s (1952) mid-20th-century masterpiece Invisible Man would be classified as a seventh-grade text and the works of Toni Morrison could be taught every year of middle school. What makes high school and college-level texts so complex is in the reading required to understand them, what Jeanne Chall (1983) speaks of as reading for multiple viewpoints and to construct a worldview; what William Perry (1999) calls multiplicity; and what Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Goldberger Tarule (1997) refer to as constructed knowledge. Such readings involve multiple levels of meaning, the use of figurative or rhetorical language, the complex structures meant for a particular purpose or discipline, and so on—they involve not simply the text but the task of reading them closely. The rigor of what students must do with the text, obviously, cannot be captured in a quantitative analysis of a text’s complexity.
Thankfully, the standards expand on these ideas and provide some guidance. According to the Common Core, complex high school–level literacy experiences in science, English, and social studies involve “multiple sources of information” (RST.11–12.7) or “multiple interpretations” (RL.11–12.7) with “uncertain” (RL.11–12.1), “conflicting” (RST.11–12.9), and “unresolved” (RST.11–12.6) components or implications; possess vocabulary with “figurative, connotative, and technical meanings” (CCRA.R.4); demand analysis and evaluation of the author’s premises, claims, and evidence; and include “particularly effective” (RI.11–12.6) uses of language and structure to achieve a purpose (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). At least a third of the Common Core Reading standards in all three subject areas incorporate these components, and the Writing anchor standards and Speaking and Listening anchor standard one do so significantly (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). The word complex is repeatedly used to invoke “ideas” (W.9-10.2); “process[es], phenomen[a], or concept[s]” (RST.9-10.2); and the structure of primary sources (RH.9–10.5; NGA & CCSSO, 2010).
As is stated in the introduction to the Common Core State Standards, high school students should be reading to literally and inferentially understand (per the Reading standards) the text itself, but they should also go beyond them to “comprehend as well as critique” (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). Rosenblatt (1994) speaks of the mature reader as engaging in two kinds of reading: efferent, reading to understand the content of the text (to learn the what), and aesthetic, reading to understand the craftsmanship of the writing (to learn the how). Note that study of craftsmanship is not just for the analysis of literature; it can also refer to precise use of vocabulary or a well-sequenced argument in nonfiction texts, too. That’s why all strands in the CCSS have a domain titled Craft and Structure. Teachers should address both efferent and aesthetic reading in all content-area instruction, since they are interwoven, rather than isolated, concepts. For instance, Reading anchor standards one, two, four, five, six, and eight ask students to look at the text while focusing on specific kinds of meaning. Students also must be able to extend their analysis of texts into critical judgments. “Evaluate authors’ differing points of view on the same historical event or issue by assessing the authors’ claims, reasoning, and evidence” (RH.11–12.6; NGA & CCSSO, 2010), for instance, includes both the understanding of the text (the point of view, the argument) and how it is constructed (assessing the quality of the argument).
Quality, in short, matters. So too does the volume (the amount) and the range (text types) students read, of course, but it is critical that students have plentiful opportunities to read works that display, in the words of the two lead writers of the Common Core ELA standards, “exceptional craft and thought”—and to do so in all content areas (Coleman & Pimentel, 2012, p. 5). Social studies and science teachers can’t just rely on primary sources or technical documents (such as lab reports); they must also utilize texts that express sophisticated ideas in sophisticated ways—essays, critiques, journalistic pieces, memoirs, and even literary fiction. Students must read for information and to argue and critique, analyze, and aesthetically appreciate language and ideas.
Students have to construct their own meaning with, but not necessarily solely within, the text. Several of the Common Core standards in each of the content areas make clear that the text assists students in pursuing answers and making decisions. For grades 11–12 social studies, for example, this includes “determin[ing] which explanation best accords with textual evidence” (RH.11–12.3), “evaluat[ing] multiple sources of information … to address a question or solve a problem” (RH.11–12.7), and “integrat[ing] information … into a coherent understanding of an idea or event” (RH.11–12.9). Thus, a significant purpose for why (and how) students are to engage with complex texts in your content area is to solve meaningful intellectual problems—the same kinds of questions that make professionals read texts closely, such as, “Was the American Revolution really revolutionary?,” “Do we need theme?,” or “What is the future of the universe?”
This shift is why text complexity has upped teaching complexity: it’s not just about putting a more difficult text in front of students—it’s about making strategic, deliberate choices about the content you choose and how to ensure students can access it in ways that match the rigor of the standards.